Posted
by
timothyon Saturday June 16, 2012 @11:12PM
from the holding-up-half-of-heaven dept.

China launched Saturday a rocket bearing three astronauts and an experimental orbiting module intended to presage a full-fledged space station at the end of this decade. While that's big news in itself, the launch also marks the first trip for a female Chinese astronaut. The BBC has a brief video, including part of a pre-launch press conference introducing 33-year-old astronaut Liu Yang, as well as her crewmates.

k-s writes: Linux, the GNU userland and Enlightenment and its foundation libraries (EFL) are known due their resource efficiency and flexibility, key components for embedded products. Today it was announced that such features led them to be used in a Fridge that runs Linux and X11 with EFL.

The Freescale i.MX25 based fridge by Electrolux (Frigidaire) provides the expected bits such as temperature controls and pre-set modes (vacation, party) as well as a special purpose drawer that cools your drinks and food with a beautiful UI. It also ships with handful applications for contacts, calendar, reminder, digital picture frame and even illustrated recipe book with a famous Brazilian magazine.Link to Original Source

Posted
by
timothyon Sunday June 13, 2010 @09:37PM
from the such-pretty-pictures dept.

climenole writes "Finally! The much discussed F-Spot vs. Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much-needed change; F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on the other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono."

zoobab writes: The Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, warning of risks for the European Parliament to be "circumvented" as a legislator when the EU will accede to the European Patent Convention (EPC). The European Patent Organisation is everything except a model of democracy: national patent offices are in power, there is no parliament involved in the decision making process, and diplomatic conferences are held behind closed doors. There are plans to create a central patent court in Europe, which would operate in a democratic vacuum, as it would not be counterbalanced by any legislative assembly, let alone the European Parliament. Such central patent court could also validate software patents via caselaw (as it was recently done with the Microsoft FAT patent by the German Supreme Court), and Microsoft, IBM or SAP are lobbying in Brussels not to reopen the software patent directive.

Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday April 06, 2010 @09:00AM
from the no-bits-for-you dept.

superapecommando submitted a blog entry written by Stallman about the UK's bandwidth initiatives. RMS says "When I read about Gordon Brown's plan to give the UK more broadband, I couldn't restrain my laughter. Isn't this the same clown now busy circumventing democracy to take away broadband from Britons who already have it? And what good would broadband do them if they're punished for using it (or even being suspected of using it)? Laying cables would be a waste of resources if people are not allowed to use them.
Brown did suggest another possible use for broadband. He said that it would enable MPs to better communicate with their constituents and keep track of what they want."

You are most certainly wrong here. From what I heard, they will use nVidia Terga GPUs, for which it will be pretty easy to have a driver.

Yeah, I must be wrong. Surely. That's why nVidia GPUs are fully supported by Free Software, and I wouldn't have to loose my rights to nVidias's proprietary software licensing. NOT! On all accounts. Nouveaux isn't really Free Software (it still carries blobs), and nVidias's drivers are as proprietary as it can get.

Besides: What is all that talk about “software freedom”?

It's my rights to run the software for any purpose, study, modify and distribute it. Software licensing that forbids any of these actions is just plain immoral and I can't accept it's terms and conditions.

It’s just a driver. If you really thought that to the end, you would have to only use hardware with all the specs available!

Just a driver, hey? Well, that just only hides that you have a horribly slow interface, perhaps not so energy efficient, without any bells and whistles! Is it still just? Not important at all?

And which are buildable with openly available tools, whose specs are available too, etc, etc, etc. Basically the ability do dig stuff out of the earth, to build machines with it, that build machines, that build your laptop, where you can put your free software on.

Please tell me where I can legally get nVidia's, PowerVR's etc... as Free Software so I can build it with openly available tools. Oh, heck... I don't need code, just get us those specs which are available as well...